It is known in the art that fixing of automotive finishing elements like panels, profiles, dashboards or parts thereof to the elements of the body of vehicle is provided through the use of fastening systems consisting essentially in a toothed pin having a mounting head, a bush and a sealing element interposed there between; the toothed shank of the pin is designed to engage into slots provided in the body elements and to adapt axially there into in order to compensate the misalignments between the finishing element and the body element receiving it due to the working tolerances; the mounting head is designed to fit into a mounting seat provided in assembly portions of the finishing element, known as “mounting towers”, which act as mounting devices for the fastening systems.
Since a plurality of differently shaped fastening systems are currently in use, each tailored for a specific application, namely to fasten a specific finishing element or a specific part of one same finishing element to a specific part of the body of the vehicle, it is necessary to provide the finishing elements to be mounted with a wide different kind of mounting towers, each shaped to receive a fastening system specifically selected among those available in the art.
The mounting devices described above create not many difficulties in the assembly phase of the fastening system to the mounting tower, which result in slowing down the assembly operations with an increase of costs; moreover they increase the cost of the finishing elements themselves since they require to adopt very strict tolerances in shaping the mounting towers; last but not the least, the complex shape required for the mounting seats to receive the mounting heads of the fastening systems results quite often in creating degassing and shrinkage problems during the molding phase through which the mounting towers and eventually the whole finishing element are obtained; this results in incomplete pieces, so generating a relatively high number of rejects or, worse, molded articles which are not reliable and can break in use.